I thought I recognized on of the painted wolves of the Philly Zoo.

Such a pretty coat coloration. Wish the others were out.

They are nice, I often use the species in my stories for when I want to simulate African ethnicity.

Good idea. Makes more sense than using the big cats. Humans are more socially like canines than like felines...and the lion pride doesn't count. The male is only around to guard the territory and make babies...

I figured out this is why I like having a pet dog and I figured it's why dogs and people have meshed so well over the years. Not to say humans and cats have done worse but for most part humans and canines have been working together longer.

The social structure of most canines is very similar to the family structure of humans. The parents/alpha pair make the rules and the rest follow.

And in the time where wolves became dogs, they have learned to read our body language better than we read theirs, and its almost natural for them.
They are the only animal who will seek out eye contact or eye direction from a human. They will even follow a glance towards an item. Chimps can't even figure out how to follow a point gesture...So it shows how in-tune dogs are with us. (which is why I can't understand keeping a wolf as a pet...You will never have the kind of bond with a wolf that you can have with a dog. Dogs seek us out, wolves do not)

Dogs are merely wolves that have been trained to accept humans as their alphas. A little too simplistic in some ways but that's essentially what it all boils down to. We humans have fully integrated into our way of living. And for the most part body language probably comprises at least half the communication between members of a pack. It's one reason why humans try so hard to teach sign language to apes as a medium of communication.

Its a little more complex than just being 'trained' to accept humans as higher ranking pack members.

Dogs have changed significantly from wolves. And not just in appearance...A dog is permanently trapped in the 'puppy' stage of a wolf...A wolf normally grows out of the playful, attention seeking, and alpha-appeasing behavior around 2 years when they hit sexual maturity (that's right, we also changed the dog's sexual maturation so they can have puppies as young as 6 months, which has done a lot of damage).

The process of domestication has significantly changed the mind of the dog from that of its wolf cousins.